A huge market exists for disk drives for mass-market computing devices such as desktop computers and laptop computers, as well as small form factor (SFF) disk drives for use in mobile computing devices (e.g. personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell-phones, digital cameras, etc.). To be competitive, a disk drive should be relatively inexpensive and provide substantial capacity, rapid access to data, and reliable performance.
Disk drives typically employ a moveable head actuator to frequently access large amounts of data stored on a disk. One example of a disk drive is a hard disk drive. A conventional hard disk drive has a head disk assembly (“HDA”) including at least one magnetic disk (“disk”), a spindle motor for rapidly rotating the disk, and a head stack assembly (“HSA”) that includes a head gimbal assembly (HGA) with a moveable head for reading and writing data. Hard disk drives have become familiar information storage devices that use a disk to store data and a moveable head to selectively read data from and write data to the disk.
Today, methods for manufacturing reader heads typically include techniques such as: (1) cutting a wafer into a plurality of row bars; (2) placing the row bars into a row bar holder for in situ inspection by a scanning electron microscope (SEM); and (3) after inspection, cutting the row bars into reader heads that are then utilized in the manufacturing of read/write heads for disk drives.
However, presently, when the row bars are placed into the grooves of a row bar holder by an operator (for example, by the operator placing them into the grooves with tweezers), they are not held in the groove in a fixed manner. Because of this, the row bars move in both the x and y direction in the grooves of the row bar holder and each row bar in each groove is located at a relatively different location relative to one another. Accordingly, the current design of the row bar holder results in considerable uncertainty in row bar positions in the grooves of the row bar holder in terms of both the row bar holder length (e.g., the y-axis) and the row bar holder width (e.g., the x-axis).
Because of this, when a scanning electron microscope (SEM) is utilized to test the reader heads of the row bars, additional steps must be taken by the testing system to determine the position of each row bar relative to each groove. This extra testing step may amount to approximately 10-15 seconds of lost time per row bar. This is because the scanning electron microscope has to constantly re-calibrate in order to perform the scanning of the row bars.
A need therefore exists for an improved row bar holder that constrains row bars along both the x-axis and y-axis such that scanning operations for the reader heads performed by a scanning electron microscope (SEM) can be employed in a much more efficient fashion.